Jon Drennan: Hello Cary. Yeah, we’re the largest consumer of paid for packaging in Europe, producing approximately 15 billion units of packaging per annum.

Interviewer: That’s a few.

Jon Drennan: A large volume.

Interviewer: And we’re here today at the Pantone Live Announcement, and I understand that this package that was distributed to all of the attendees that your company produces. So maybe you can talk to us a little bit about how you, as a print producer, a converter, have been working with Pantone in the development of this project.

Jon Drennan: So, we started approximately 18 months ago. We had some issues with a particular customer, we had unacceptable rejection rates, and we approached Pantone Live to assist with a solution. So generally, our quality has been very good; we had a particular problem with the exacting process. Over the last 12 months or so, Pantone Live have been able to work with us to reduce that rejection rate to zero in the last 12 months. It’s just been a fantastic result. My factory in Lester was more than happy to supply the promotional content for the launch today because I think it’s a good representation of what’s possible using the Pantone Live technologies. So we’ve been very happy. It gives us color consistency and it allows us to digitalize our current color palette and offer the customer something that wasn’t previously possible.

Interviewer: So you really started working with the brand owner through the design process and then the production process to make sure that there was that, that scientific consistency, so taking it from an art to a science.

Jon Drennan: Exactly. So we’ve been able to move forward. Customers have always been able to have a representation of what the package would look like in terms of a contract proof, but we’ve been able to move to a stage were that’s now color accurate for all colors for the customers. So it gives the customer a huge amount of confidence in terms of what they see at conceptual stage will actually come out that way in manufacture.

Interviewer: And this particular product was printed on what kind of technology?

Jon Drennan: That was printed litho.

Interviewer: Litho. Okay.

Jon Drennan: It was printed litho with six special colors.

Interviewer: Okay. And then they… their packaging is produced using litho or using flexo or…

Jon Drennan: Their packages are produced litho; our factory in Lester is primarily lithographic packaging. We specialize in UV special colors, and all for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry.

Interviewer: And then what sort of workflow are you using. I mean, how do you download that color specification from Pantone Live?

Jon Drennan: And using an ESKO Solution artwork software, they allow us to take the color into prepress, downloading the information into the machine, and then we’ve got a closed loop system to verify that color back using Sun Chemical and X Rite measurement technologies. So it gives us a nice ranged solution, we can go to the customers with a very confident approach saying, what we tell them we’ll do; we will deliver in the packaging.

Interviewer: That’s great. So you plan on expanding this to other customers then?

Jon Drennan: We’ve got 42 factories around the world and hopefully over the next couple of years we’ll move that across the sites. Fifteen billion units of packing is only in Europe, but we hope to roll that across the rest of the world.

Senior Editor Cary Sherburne speaks with Hunkeler's Hans Gut who explains what's new from Hunkeler, including the DP-8 dynamic perfer and the smart book solution for short-run book production, both of which were shown for the first time at Hunkeler Innovationsdays 2015 in Lucerne.

Senior Editor Cary Sherburne speaks with Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies about our recent visit to Hunkeler Innovationdays in Lucerne. His enthusiasm about this event was reflected by everyone who attended and he articulates its value well.

Senior Editor Cary Sherburne talks with Marketing Leader Erich Hodel of Hunkeler about where attendees came from and what they saw at Hunkeler Innovationdays 2015. He highlights Hunkeler's brand-new control platform that enables end-to-end control of print jobs.

Franz Hunkeler, Chairman of the Board at Hunkeler, looks back over the week at a very successful Hunkeler Innovationdays 2015, the history of the event over the past 22 years, and a peek ahead to 2017.